by Simon Mawer
And scent doing something else, something that he would have to come to terms with later, confess to some anonymous priest – for he would be loath to speak of it to his usual confessor who would tell him what he did not want to hear, that he should put temptation away and never see the woman again. He didn’t want an admonition like that. Already he was bargaining with his God. For in that embrace he felt a palpable tumescence. And he experienced the bewildering sensation that the physical may be bound up entirely with the spiritual, so much so that he was uncertain which had happened: had lust dragged down love, or had the spiritual, the cerebral elevated erection to a prayer?
How long before the lights came on? One minute? Ten? There was first a distant twilight and a shout from the upper world – the crone who guarded the souls of the dead coming with a torch – and then the bulbs themselves flicked on once, twice, and then remained on, to display the waste of rubble around the clinging couple, stark in their unshaded light. They parted in embarrassment. ‘Oh God, how awkward,’ she cried, avoiding his eye and brushing herself down almost as though ridding herself of some kind of contamination. ‘I really think we’d better be going, don’t you?’ She picked up her skirt a fraction and examined her knee. ‘Blast, I’ve torn my tights on that wall.’ She didn’t look up. She no longer looked at him, no longer caught his eye and smiled in that manner of hers, part irony, part curiosity, part wondering whether she was missing something that others had understood. She didn’t look at him. It is said that you can tell when a man and a woman have become adulterers. Before the event they watch each other all the time, steal mutual glances at every opportunity. After they have consummated their passion they avoid one another’s eyes.
From that moment in the darkness of the palaeo-Christian subterranean Church of San Crisogono, Madeleine Brewer avoided Leo Newman’s eye.
A voice on the phone, disturbingly familiar, a faint tone of mockery, a sharp hint of the profane. ‘Can I come round and see you? I want to talk. Will it be difficult?’
‘Here at the flat?’
‘Wherever.’ Outside the open window was the scream of swifts and the distant roar of traffic down the Lungotevere. Inside, within the dull boundaries of his apartment, he sweated. ‘It’s up to you,’ he said.
‘The flat. The lion’s lair.’
She came at ten-thirty in the morning. He watched her from the window as she walked along the pavement on the far side of the street. She crossed to an island in the stream of traffic, glancing up for a moment at the Palazzo Casadei in front of her, waiting for a break, an eddy in the whirl of car and bus and moped that might let her across to the near bank. A bus stopped to disgorge passengers nearby. She plunged into the flow, a small, determined figure in navy skirt and sensible walking shoes and a bright red jacket. A wide, slightly masculine stride. He watched her disappear directly below.
Fear? Nothing so focused. Confusion. A sense of choking panic. A faint hint of revulsion at the prospect of her smell, her presence, the fragile sound of her voice. And impatience, an impatience that was without direction or focus, just an impatience that the thing should be over.
She apologised as she came in, although it wasn’t clear what she had to apologise for. She looked around distractedly and threw her jacket – blood red, a haemorrhage, a clot – across the back of the chair that she and Jack had given him, and said how sorry she was to bother him; while Newman fussed around her, drew up a chair for her to sit, apologised for its discomfort, busied himself making a cup of coffee at the electric ring in the narrow kitchen. Absurdly he found himself ashamed of his room, of the dull furniture and the paltry possessions. These were things of which he had once been proud: proud of their deficiencies, that is.
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated as she took the coffee. ‘I suppose you get this all the time.’
‘What?’
‘People opening their hearts to you.’
‘Is that what you’re doing?’
She laughed and looked away, blushing, looking for distractions, finding little in that uncompromising place. ‘You need flowers in here. I should have brought some. The place needs brightening up.’
‘A woman’s touch?’
‘If you like. I suppose the idea would revolt you.’ She got up from the chair she had hardly sat in and went over to the window, to crouch down and look out on the street, to pick at the curtain, to touch, for no apparent reason, the pane of glass. ‘Now we see through a glass darkly,’ she murmured, ‘then, face to face.’
‘Why revolt?’
‘Aren’t you allergic to that kind of thing, stuck in your masculine world?’ She made a small expression of distaste. Her face was reflected in the windowpane and he could see both, the face and the faint, milky reflection. ‘I’m sorry. I invited myself here and I’m just being rude. I don’t even know whether it was the right thing to do in the first place. I want to talk about Jack, about my marriage, but I don’t expect you’re the right person to do that with, are you? I need a parish priest. A parish priest might not have personal experience to refer to but he’s heard it all before, isn’t that the idea? Whereas you …’ He let her talk. A small flood of words, neither one thing nor the other, neither social chat nor true confession. ‘Did you never think of marrying? That’s an impertinent question. You might not be interested … in women, I mean. I’ve got my tenses wrong. You might not have been interested. We’ve already talked about this, haven’t we? Wasn’t she called Elisa? Elise. And anyway it’s not my business to enquire. But I was interested in men, obviously enough I guess, a man in particular like a good little Catholic girl although there were one or two others before Jack, and now I’m not.’
And as she talked, she crossed the void, turned to look at him with a faint smile, but smiling into him not at him. No one had ever done that before. He had no experience of it. ‘What do you think I should do?’ she asked, and Newman realised that he had not really been listening, or if listening had not really grasped what she was saying, like someone trying to follow a conversation in a foreign language where every word is understood in isolation but the import of the whole is missed. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
‘Do?’
‘Yes, do. About Jack. You’ve not been listening, have you?’ She grinned suddenly, amused at having caught him out. ‘Fat lot of good you are. Or was it too boring for words?’
‘Of course I was listening. Your marriage has grown stale. But isn’t that to be expected? Isn’t that the kind of thing you just have to struggle through for a while?’
‘And what about your marriage? To Holy Mother Church. Does that grow stale?’
‘Are we talking about you or me?’
‘I’m sorry. Of course I shouldn’t pry. Me. I. We were talking of me. But the problem is, you are the only person I can talk to. Do you realise that, Leo?’
‘Me?’
‘You see, you were one thing … and you’ve become another.’
Anxiety. Anxiety is fear spread out thin, a thin coating of fear on the face of every action. ‘Another? I don’t follow.’
‘You were a priest, and you’ve become a … friend. I’m sorry, perhaps there shouldn’t be a distinction. This isn’t a confession, Leo. I’m just a woman confiding in a friend.’
And he thought: woman, ’issâ, because she came forth from man, ’is. Women get a mixed press in the Bible, starting with Eve of course. Snakes weave their way into the discourse of women, holding out the fruit of forbidden knowledge, knowledge of the fruit that lies there, below the folds of cloth, between those heavy, quite un-masculine thighs. Difficult, women. Consider her namesake, Mary of Magdala, the woman from whom seven devils were cast.
‘But Father Leo is now plain Leo,’ she was saying, ‘to whom I can talk not as a confessor but as an ordinary, I hope sympathetic, fellow human. And I hope he doesn’t find it an intrusion.’ Leo fumbled some kind of reply, but she took little notice, merely smiled at him with her direct and careless smile, and confe
ssed to crisis. ‘Oh, big crisis, Leo. Faith, love, the whole thing. Am I incoherent once more? You have before you someone who is destitute.’ She laughed. On the surface it seemed her usual, open laugh, the laugh that bore within itself the sharp, acerbic flavour of self-mockery. An acquaintance would never have detected anything untoward in it, no despair, no anguish. But those things were there. Somehow he knew them, and the very intimacy of knowing them disturbed him. ‘I have no more faith, Leo. It’s gone, vanished, puff! in a little cloud of dust. Can you bring it back with your subtle, Jesuitical arguments? I no longer love God, because I have ceased to believe in his existence, and I no longer love Jack, who, I might say, has long given the impression of no longer loving me, because in a way I no longer believe in his existence either. Do I sound very like a silly teenager?’
‘A little.’
‘But there’s a difference. I am liable to act. With teenagers often enough it just blows over. But I may act.’
‘And do what?’
She shook her head. ‘Don’t know yet. But it’s there, the possibility. I feel it. You see, you’ve only got one chance, haven’t you? I know you won’t be so foolish as to give me the party line about treasures in heaven, or saving yourself for the Day of Judgment or whatever. When you’re my age you’ve only got one chance left. There’s a certain obligation to take it, isn’t there?’
‘Obligation?’
‘To yourself. There’s no one else, is there?’
‘I thought there might be a few others. The children, for example.’
She considered this idea thoughtfully. ‘Do you remember Saint Crisogono?’
‘What about it?’ Anxiety deepened, focused, became plain fear. Panic rose in his throat like gorge.
‘Our visit there?’
‘Of course.’ The sensation of her in his arms, the fragile presence of her, her shoulders beneath his hands, her head a mere hair’s breadth beneath his face, the breadth of her hair, the breath of her hair; the focus of being in total darkness, so that she became the only thing, or rather her touch, her tactile presence became the only thing in his universe. Panic.
‘I’m just as I was then, Leo. In the dark. Total.’ And she began to weep, quite suddenly, almost as though nothing had gone on before that ought to have given notice of this possibility, this organic manifestation of whatever emotion, it was that coursed beneath her calm outer surface. He got up and went over to her and put his hand on her shoulder, awkwardly, as one might with a male friend who has suddenly and unexpectedly displayed embarrassing emotion; and she raised her own hand and clasped his softly, squeezing it, stroking it, and saying all the while that grown-ups don’t just cry for nothing, do they, not like children?
Hysteria. Of course he had been warned against it. Hysteria, from hystera a womb. It was, he understood, something that besets women. Jezebel, Susanna, their names stalk the nightmares of the celibate. Salome tosses the veil aside and gyrates her hips while Herodias calls for heads. Delilah strokes the male head of hair and reaches for her scissors while speaking in tones of blandishment and seduction. Judith reaches down the scimitar.
‘I’m all right,’ Madeleine said after a while. ‘God, how embarrassing. I’m quite all right.’ She shook her head, shook tears from her eyes, found a handkerchief and dabbed at her face. ‘Has my makeup run? What a sight I must look. I have been an unconscionable imposition on you.’ She smiled through bruised, inflamed eyes and asked if she could use the bathroom – and it occurred to him that someone who could use the word unconscionable in those circumstances could hardly be considered hysterical.
He waited while she splashed around for a while, and when she came back her former equilibrium had been restored. She spoke in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice: ‘And now I’m going to say what I didn’t dare the other day in that bloody church.’
The censorious priest spoke, probably for the last time: ‘Bloody?’
‘Well, they are bloody. The whole Faith is bloody – look at the stations of the cross, or the Sacred Heart of Jesus, or the Blood of the Redemption, or almost anything else you care to mention. The whole Faith is floated on blood. The multitudinous seas incarnadine.’ She had lost her fugitive beauty and now looked merely dull and determined, her face clenched into a kind of smile, a humourless smile, as though it was battened against the wind, against the rain, against whatever the elements might throw against her. ‘I’m going to speak, and, out of pure, human compassion if nothing else, you’re to hear me out without interruption.’ And he knew what it was even before she spoke, for the thing was obvious really.
‘I have fallen in love with you,’ she said. ‘I’m not hysterical. I have never been more serious in my life. And I know that it is all hopeless. I know, Leo. I know. But there it is.’ With care, as though balancing on the edge of a precipice, she opened her hands to show that she had given up all support and security and was ready to plunge over the edge. Her face was pale. The freckles across her nose stood out like blemishes. He could see the creases at her eyes, the dry brush-strokes of her eyebrows, the uneven texture of her skin, the lines that age had etched there.
He went over to her and he put out his hand and touched her cheek. Physically, that is what he did, just touched her cheek, and thereby did what had been denied him for so long, for almost three decades: made intimate contact with someone. You shake hands, yes; maybe you even embrace and exchange kisses. But you never touch another’s cheek. An act of intimacy, a carnal act, feeling the flesh, the downy fabric of the other, surprisingly, startlingly soft. He touched her cheek and she made a small noise, inarticulate and mouselike, like the cry of a small mammal in distress. She made this sound and she came nearer him and they embraced, just as they had done in the darkness of the Church of San Crisogono, her head turned and pressed against his chest. But this time they were out in the light and the terms of endearment were clear between them, and he could not do anything else but lower his head and press his face clumsily – practice, how do you find practice in such things? – against her hair, against the silken down at the nape of her neck.
The scent of her presence, a strange, alien scent, flooded through him. It seemed as important as anything, more important than any cerebrations, more vital than any rationalisation – her scent, with its blend of the mammal and the floral, the warm perfume of her skin and hair mixed with the sharp scent of fruit, the irrational chasing out the cerebral. He felt something akin to panic, something of the excitement associated with fear, something of the terrifying abstraction that might be associated with madness; and something of the dangerous conviction of heresy.
‘Leo,’ she murmured from deep against his chest, ‘what are we going to do? Whatever are we going to do?’
Malaria
She is talking to Leo, of her childhood, of the days in Mähren, Moravia, near Buchlowitz. She sits askew on the side of his bed, and leans back against the propped-up pillow, and her arm is round the child’s shoulders and her hand is playing with a lock of his hair. The boy listens with wide eyes, as though she is telling fairy stories, fantastic fables from long ago, and indeed there are wolves and wild boar and dwarfs in the forests of the Chřiby Hills – she pronounces the awkward Slavonic name with ease – and great, black castles high amongst the trees; and she does talk of a fabulous world, a lost world that lives on only in memories and posed photographs, a world of horses and carriages, of lamplight, of long winter evenings when whole villages were cut off from each other and from the city by drifts of snow, of the house where she was born and lived until she married – ‘the Zamek we used to call it. It was said that Marshal Kutuzov himself stayed there before the battle of Austerlitz. Oh, it was a wonderful home. And the gardens! The gardens, with the peacocks and the arboretum and the fuchsarium – which was Papi’s favourite. He always said that a man ought to have an occupation, and growing fuchsias was his – and we used to make a hideout in the arboretum, your uncle and I, and no one could find us for hours, and …’ and her tide of
words turns and begins to ebb, the memory of adulthood taking the place of the fantasies of childhood:
‘And in 1926 I met your father. We were in Marienbad. We used to go to Marienbad every season for the waters. Papi said he preferred it to Karlsbad because it was quieter and less claustrophobic – Karlsbad in the ditch, he used to call it – and we took rooms at the Weimar where everyone went, and that was where I met your father …’
Things change. We grow old. The centre – that is childhood – cannot hold.
‘It was summer. He was on leave from the Foreign Office, and staying with friends who had a house somewhere nearby. The borders meant so little then, you see. You could cross them at will, and going from Bavaria to Austria to Bohemia was as though you were still in the same country. And I came down the great staircase, looking, oh, so young and beautiful – sixteen, that’s all – and there was this man, standing with a group of friends, smoking, and he just turned and looked …’
A lost world. The centre cannot hold, Mitteleuropa cannot hold.
